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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#111

Post by avian »

Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

> We reported the sites to both CF and Google, and to my knowledge, not a single site were removed before the people behind it took it down.

As someone that tried reporting spam sites because they were using content scrapped from my website, I'm not surprised.

Cloudflare has a policy that they will not stop providing their IP hiding/reverse proxy services to anyone, regardless of complaints. The best they do is forward your complaint to the owner of the website, who is free to ignore it.

They say "we're not a hosting provider" as if that's an excuse that they can't refuse to offer their service. I'm sure many spam websites would go away if they couldn't hide behind Cloudflare.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#112

Post by ultimoo »

Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

> By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it.

Very curious to know what you found!

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#113

Post by olyjohn »

tesseract wrote: post #95
zadler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.

Probably even more information of that nature is hidden in Facebook Groups where it was never searchable in the first place.

Millions of useful photos have disappeared off of forums, now that Photobucket is dead.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#115

Post by dylan604 »

Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

That sounds like a hell of an investigation, and now my curiosity is running. 100k domains sounds like an huge amount of logistics on their side to keep it all running. It would be interesting to read about how a spam company manages that kind of infrastructure compared to a "legit" company.

Legit company will always have internal struggles between dev/sales/marketing, so things just take longer and are much more draining to accomplish. I'd imaginge spam org just needs to have bare minimum stuff up to satisfy whatever need it is they have knowing that humans won't necessarily be perusing those domains, yet it's 100K domains. I could almost see something like this running more smoothly. I can also see it being run by small number of people that let things lapse and it's just barely hanging together. So many questions...

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#116

Post by berkes »

adventured wrote: post #73
soheil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense, does DDG do the same? If yes isn't that against their "We don't track users" mantra? If no how do they improve their results while missing such a powerful signal?

I would be fairly certain that DDG isn't itself tracking users in a manner that they can use that ranking approach. They don't need to. If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someon…

Your entire rant hinges on on the premise that Bing and DDG ranking are the same. They are not and you can easily check that for yourself.

Especially not for terms that would have a personal vector, like an ambigouous 'Ruby Gems' or controversial 'effectivity of mouth mask'

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#117

Post by dylan604 »

janmo wrote: post #33
nmstoker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume "GPL" was an autocorrect from the intended "GPT" right?

Correct, it was a typo

I don't know. I've tried reading the GPL2 & 3, and a lot of it just sounds like lawyer gibberish to me that could easily be attributed to GPT

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#119

Post by rapind »

> I think that Google uses stats on whether the user continued checking more results for that specific search query to determine if the visited result answered the user.

God I hope not. If Google does do this, it sounds like a really dumb idea, which will ultimately create widespread usability issues. I can already envision SEO consultants recommending this for their clients if this is believed.

Doesn’t look like it according to https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rank...

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#120

Post by weird-eye-issue »

Ueland wrote: post #110
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #48

Some data on their traffic from some SEO tools I pay for: Ahrefs: 230k organic traffic valued at $124k SEMRush: 558k organic traffic valued at $355k These are estimates and can be widely under or overestimated but they show that this is happening on a very large scale. For a quick idea on how this is possible I looked at their top pages (according to Ahrefs). Their top page is ranking #2 for the keyword "interia" whi…

Sidenote but what do you think about Ahrefs? I'm doing some tests to see how easy it is to get ranked for keywords (with actual helpful content, not crap like this thread is about), but i find the Adsense keyword tool not that helpful as they delete many keywords when you search for them, which kinda voids that tool. But I currently feel that paying $100/mo for Ahrefs for something I do as a side project is a tad was…

You need a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush for competitor analysis and keyword research. One trick with Ahrefs if you want to be frugal is to pay for the $7 trial and use it as much as possible during the trial to do your keyword research and cancel. Technically if you are efficient enough that trial could get you months worth of content at least.
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